How Do I Ice Cake Dummies?

Very silly question I'm sure, but is there any trick to icing cake dummies? I'm considering doing a small bridal show and will need at least 2 dummy cakes. I'd like to do one in buttercream and one in fondant. Does one work better than the other? How do you store them? Any other tips?

I've done dummies in spackle (won't do it again), royal icing (my second least favorite), butter cream and dummies.

For other you would ice just like you would a cake, though since they are more light weight you may need to glue them to a board or tape them down. On the fondant covered one, you need to round the edges of the top of the dummy, either using sand paper or just by pressing the edges against a hard surface.

To store it, I would just put it in an area away from sunlight and florescent lights. If you are storing it for any lenght of time you can put it in a cardboard box to keep dust off of it.

When I attended one of the classes at the ICES Convention in Charlotte, NC, the pros there were saying to coat the dummies in Crisco and then cover it with the fondant. They said putting Crisco on it allowed you to easily remove it later to redecorate. Putting water on the dummy makes you have to pull and scrape fondant off in little pieces. It made sense to me.

You can read my experince with the spackle above. For me, it didn't dry white, took forever to dry and just didn't work at all for what I was wanting to do. I thought I'd save some money using it, but at this point I'm pretty sure it would have just been cheaper/easier to make royal or buttercream.

To me, a cake dummy should represent what a real cake would look like, so now I prefer to use the icings I would use on a real cake. I work with them all the time, know how they behave.

Wow!!! Sorry that you had to go through that but thanks for posting it. It helps a lot. I was thinking about spackle but everyone says it looks like fondant when it actually dries so I am just covering in buttercream and praying for the best. For the cakes I actually want fondant on I am doing the crisco rub/fondant application. Any tips on how to secure the dummies? Most are stacked cake on cake style but one will have pillars and another has foam separators that are smaller than the tiers above and below. I imagine using the cake plates would just be a waste and I am afraid dowels would damage them and I hope to be able to reuse them later. I just want to make sure those two don't fall over on the way. I'm not a crier but I imagine I would be sobbing in a corner of that happened.

some people say they cover them in plastic wrap first so they can easily remove the buttercream afterward but I believe indydebi posted somewhere else that her buttercream iced dummies dry rock hard after a while and then she just slips a knife between the styrofoam and buttercream and it will pop off. Then you can rinse and re-use. If you are using fondant just rub the dummies with crisco first and it will stick well and come off easier. HTH

I've never had the misfortune of buying the pink spackle that's suppose to dry white (like TexasSugar did), nor the clay-like spackle that's gray colored. I've had success and very favorable results with white spackleit doesn't take too long to dry, it's easy to use (just like buttercream and easier than royal icing), and the end result looks just like buttercream. When thoroughly dry, it's lightweight, durable, and doesn't yellow over time.

Much success to those who are considering trying it (or trying it again, TexasSugar!), I've had no regrets!